How Safe Is Safe Enough?

One of the ugly truths of engineering is that life has a price. Cars, buildings, power plants, and industrial machinery can always be made safer for a cost, but manufacturers are at the mercy of the market.

”If you ask people how much money you should spend to save a human life, they’ll always say, ‘Whatever it takes,’” Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California-Berkeley and author of the book Energy for Future Presidents, told us. “That’s not really rational behavior, but there’s something dry and inhuman about thinking through the actual numbers.”

Indeed, there’s something cold about it. When we pointed out that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant was originally designed for an 8.2-level earthquake a couple of weeks ago, some readers were incensed. Japan, they said, has a long history of earthquakes and its utilities should have been prepared for a 9.0. “Any designer who fails to look at the 100-year environment is failing to meet the canon of ethics,” noted one commenter on our website.

On the flip side, the professors of nuclear engineering and physics we interviewed saw it differently. Considering the mammoth nature of the earthquake (which reportedly shifted the earth’s axis between 4 inches and 10 inches and took 15,000 lives), and considering the fact that the World Health Organization recently declared radiation exposure levels in the region to be low, they saw it as a victory for the plant’s design. “The reactor was 40-years-old and it stood up well,” Ahmad Hassanein, head of the nuclear engineering department at Purdue University, told us. “Given the situation, it did better than expected.”

The disparity between those responses can be partially explained by the wildly differing reports emanating from the Internet. Cancer deaths in Japan have been projected to reach anywhere between 40 and 40 million. But that’s not the entire reason for the differences in belief. Much of the debate still comes back to those old issues of design and risk.

Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil/environmental and industrial engineering at the University of Southern California, told us that most engineers simply design within the boundaries they’re given. “Engineers try to do a good job based on their training,” said Meshkati, who has studied the Bophal gas disaster, Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “But there are issues of safety and risk that are beyond their level. In many cases, they’re too low on the food chain.” (Meshkati is currently studying Fukushima, but declined to comment on it.)

Still, decisions are made. Often, the numbers depend on a process called Probabilistic Risk Assessment, which looks at what can go wrong, how likely it is, and what its consequences are, Meshkati said. In the end, the numbers are linked to resources, which are never unlimited on any project.

In essence, that’s the nature of engineering. It’s why we don’t have $2 million uncrashable cars that are built like tanks. It’s why houses succumb to earthquakes, table saws lop off fingers, and 30,000 people annually die on our roads. It all comes back to the question of how safe is safe enough? And it’s why engineers see the issues of safety differently than the rest of the world.

It’s also why the professors we interviewed thought the Fukushima plant performed well, despite the ongoing clean-up, groundwater problems, and long-term evacuation. Coal, they said, would have killed thousands more. And the collapse of 120,000 buildings in Japan did kill thousands more. Additional resources might have been better directed toward the design of sturdier buildings, they said.

”Maybe you’re asking the wrong question,” Muller told us, when we asked how much utilities should have been willing to spend to beef up the Fukushima plant for a 9.0 earthquake. “Instead of asking how much you’re willing to spend, maybe you should ask what to spend it on.”

The article says that the prototype vehicles carry about 5kg H2 at 10,000 psi. Assuming the tank is at a balmy 80F, that hydrogen occupies about 24gallons (basic PV = nRT calc). The article also says that a kg of H2 is roughly equivalent to a gallon of gasoline, so that's about 5 times the volume of ordinary, liquid, atmospheric pressure gasoline, just for fuel.

And that's just the hydrogen. What about the pressure vessel? And all of the ultra-high pressure lines and pressure regulation and risk of sitting on a bomb?

It's cool that we're experimenting with this technology but I can't see it being anything but a niche application for a long time to come. Petroleum prices have to get redonkulously expensive before this tech becomes even remotely attractive for a common user.

Windhorn, Six months for an FMEA on one component? Either they are: a.) evaluating it on a molecular level, or b.) doing it part time with a weekly FMEA committee meeting, or c.) Milking the project most strenuously. I can see that there could be 40 pages of report, but it is unomaginable that the FMEA could take that long, if the team understood the product beuing evaluated. If it was a team of "avaerage" engineers that had never seen the product previously and had never worked to gether before then it might take a lot more time. But why in the whole world would a team be selected for an FMEA that did not understand the product intimately. OUr team that worked so (apparently rapidly) knew and understood every aspect of the product completely, prior to our first time spent on doing the FMEA. There is no other raional way to approach such an important project.

WilliamK writes: "And air pollution comes from many sources and getting rid of all of them will reduce our standard of living to staying in caves and eating rocks. OK, that is an exageration, I know, but I am also aware that there are a whole lot of people, some who are actially well meaning, who want to force us into some utopian realm by taking away most of our freedoms, which include driving away from them in our carbon-based fueld automobiles."

Funny, when I do the math, removing 3.2M deaths and many times that illnesses/injuries from fossil fuel pollution, frees up about $3T to be added back into the global economy to improve the quality of life on this planet ... which is almost enough to pay the entire cost of needed high temp reactors.

If we simply stop producing gasoline/diesel cars/trucks, then other than a small number of collectors vehicles, everything else can be phased out to H2/EV hybrids in two decades or so by natural attrition. Providing H2 conversion kits at a low subsidized cost, will entice even a significant number of car collectors to upgrade, just so they can drive them everyday, without having to find gasoline/diesel which will start to get scarce/expensive with lower volume use.

I don't see any reason to come knocking at your door, asking for your car keys.

WilliamK writes: "But you will find that nobody dies from atmospheric CO, but rather from enclosed space incidents."

So? what's the point? Carbon monoxide poisoning is the most common cause of injury and death due to poisoning worldwide

And it affects an unborn child significantly worse, because the CO binds to their blood in significantly higher percentages, to the point that it means the death or injury of the child, while the mother is just sick from it. Which is a statistic that probably isn't being kept.

All electric homes and shifting to an H2 fuel gas based transportation are two ways to avoid over 20,000 deaths each year world wide, and a significant number of brain and organ injuries for those with near death concentrations.

This isn't the biggest reason for becoming a fossil fuel free planet, unless you are one of the 50,000 or so affected by this each year.

I have nothing against nuclear power plants, I think that they are a god idea but they certainly need to be designed to survive multiple systems failures. BUT that should not be that much more effort, an FMEA for the complete plant would probably take a team of engineers less than a week. It would certainly be time and effort very well spent and could never approach 1% of the cost to build the plant. So if the power plants can be built using a bit of common sense, with the politicians kept at bay for the duration, we could have a good chance at atomic power to replace the coal fired kind.

But you will find that nobody dies from atmospheric CO, but rather from enclosed space incidents. And a lot of people die from fires, which really can't be blamed on fossile fuel.

And air pollution comes from many sources and getting rid of all of them will reduce our standard of living to staying in caves and eating rocks. OK, that is an exageration, I know, but I am also aware that there are a whole lot of people, some who are actially well meaning, who want to force us into some utopian realm by taking away most of our freedoms, which include driving away from them in our carbon-based fueld automobiles.

WilliamK writes: "It is still not clear that "many are dying from fossile fuels", at least not around here, in the US." ... and has problems with H2 in automotive use.

I will help with your research ... H2 tank technology and transportation trials - 680 miles in a Prius

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1717/

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/July/02070902.asp

US commercial Nuke deaths is close to zero.

I've posted a number of sources to review for US deaths/injury, and world wide death/injury .... some are below ... which easily total more than world wide nuke power related death/injury.

See the following links for US deaths, which are far from zero, plus the other links I provided reciently. Us deaths are significant, world wide are higher. There are particulate related deaths/injury, and chemical related deaths/injury.

This article states: http://www.worldwatch.org/air-pollution-now-threatening-health-worldwide "In the U.S., air pollution causes as many as 50,000 deaths per year and costs as much as $40 billion a year in health care and lost productivity."

The article www.nrdc.org/health/kids/ocar/chap4.asp states: "Which states "A recent study estimated that approximately 64,000 people in the United States die prematurely from heart and lung disease every year due to particulate air pollution".

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc191212.htm states: Worldwide, a record 3.2m people a year died from air pollution in 2010"

The article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning states: "In the United States, approximately 200 people die each year from carbon monoxide poisoning associated with home fuel-burning heating equipment.[83] Carbon monoxide poisoning contributes to the approximately 5613 smoke inhalation deaths each year in the United States.[124] The CDC reports, "Each year, more than 500 Americans die from unintentional carbon monoxid"

Pat, it sounds like you are closer to that technology than I am. What sizes and resulting weights are a subject for a detailed computational investigation, since anything else is a guess. Some folks guess very well, but in that area I would need to do all of the math. Good engineering practice dictates that when one does not know, one researches and finds out. But for a hydrogen fueld car, even after you have the best size gas bottle and working pressure all calculated, the serious issue of avoiding leaks is still there. Keeping a hydrogen system intact in a lab environment takes some effort, but in a car that shakes and vibrates it could be much more challenging. That is the basis for my conclusion that it may not be worth the effort.

Some people, it seems, just don't understand that not everything that can be done can be done satisfactorily and with a reasonable amount of effort. But perhaps there could be some reasonable means to provide hydrogen fuel for all vehicles and power generation and heating applications, as our departed blogger suggests. Or possibly not.

It is still not clear that "many are dying from fossile fuels", at least not around here, in the US. So without agreement about that basic premise the rest of the argument becomes rather "secondary". The two people who I knew who died from fossile fuel use died because of motor vehicle accidents, not especially related to vehicle emissions.

If you’re developing an embedded monitoring and control application, then you’ll want to take note of the upcoming Design News Continuing Education Center class, “Embedded Development Using Microchip Microcontrollers and the CCS C Compiler."

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